Moment dog walker came within inches of being crushed by falling tree

A dog walker had a lucky escape after she narrowly avoided being crushed by a falling tree in a near-miss caught on CCTV.

Yuan Zhang, 40, was just leaving a cemetery in Bath in Somerset when she and her pet had a near miss caught on CCTV.

‘I didn’t expect that such a big branch was going to fall,’ she said.

‘I just turned to the left side because I noticed that the tree might have a problem. It just felt immediate. My dog got really scared – she totally freaked out.’

She explained that she had forgotten about the incident until she received a message from her friends with CCTV.

She added: ‘I saw the video and my friends were like ‘are you ok?’ It seems like the branch is super close to me, but I still had one metre of space.’

The owner of the pub, which caught the incident on CCTV, Charlotte Symonds, said the noise of the branch falling was ‘horrendous’.

‘My partner was in the porchway of the pub, and he could see that no one was underneath the tree, but saw this near miss – it was very close to hitting her,’ she said.

‘An ambulance came, and we were directing the traffic so there were no accidents. Then the police came, and they managed to keep one side of the road open.’

Councillor Manda Rigby, Bath and North East Somerset Council cabinet member for communications and community, added: ‘We’re very relieved no one was harmed. Our tree team was on site within an hour.

‘They found signs of structural weakness within the branch that would not have been visible when the tree was inspected last June and was found to be in good health.’

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